Bitcoin Knots Has Been Nothing More Than A Denial-of-Service Attack On

In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack; UK: /dɒs/ doss US: /dɑːs/ daas^[1]) is a cyberattack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network. -The Wikipedia definition of denial-of-service attack. 

This is a very basic concept. Someone makes use of their own resources to disrupt the functioning of other machines on a network. 

DoS attacks have been an issue for as long as the internet existed. One of the commonly argued “first Distributed Denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks” was against the Internet Service Provider (ISP) Panix in the mid-90s. There were of course many prior technical examples on older internet services, but this was one of, if not the, first major examples of such an attack on the modern World Wide Web. 

This attack had numerous computers start to initiate a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection with the ISPs servers, but never finishing the handshake protocol that finalized the connection. This consumes the server’s resources for managing network connections and prevents honest users from accessing the internet through the ISP’s servers. 

Ever since this “initial” DDoS attack, they have been as common on the internet as storms are in nature, a regular occurrence that massive pieces of internet infrastructure have been built to defend against. 

The Blockchain

The blockchain is one of the core components of Bitcoin, and a required dependency for Bitcoin’s functionality as a distributed ledger. I am sure many people in this space would call so-called “spam” transactions a DoS attack on the Bitcoin blockchain. In order to call it that, you would have to define the “service” that the blockchain is offering as a system, and explain how spam transactions are denying that service to others in a way not intended by the design of the system. 

I’d wager a bet that most people who believe spam is a DoS attack would say something like “the service the blockchain offers is processing financial transactions, and spam takes space away from people trying to do that.” The problem is, that is not specifically the service the blockchain offers. 

The service it actually offers is the confirmation of any consensus valid transaction through a real-time auction that periodically settles whenever a miner finds a block. If your transaction is consensus valid, and you have bid a high enough fee for a miner to include your transaction in a block, you are using the service the blockchain provides exactly as designed. 

This was a conscious design decision made over years during the “Block Size Wars” and finalized in the activation of Segregated Witness and the rejection of the Segwit2x blocksize increase through a hard fork pushed by major companies at the time.  The blockchain would function by prioritizing the highest bidding fee transactions, and…